NHS (Charitable Trusts Etc) Bill

Baroness Blackstone Excerpts

Friday 26th February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as the chairman of the Great Ormond Street Hospital board, and I want to give the reassurance that I am not Captain Hook in disguise.

I thank my noble friend Lady Massey of Darwen for taking forward this Private Member’s Bill in this House. I especially thank Wendy Morton, the Member of Parliament for Aldridge-Brownhills, for introducing the Bill in the House of Commons and for her very hard work in helping the passage of the Bill through the other place.

In advance of what the Minister is to say, I also thank him and the Government for their support for the Bill. I say that in particular since, as my noble friend Lady Massey of Darwen has already said, back in 2014 I attempted to make an amendment to the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, but without success. So it is a great pleasure that it looks as though as we are going to be successful today.

I want to say a little bit—I feel that I am obliged to do so and I want to do so—about the enormous value of the charity to the hospital’s work. It cannot be overstated. I thank the charity and its special trustees for the enormous amount of hard work that they put in to raise funds. Its current strategy is to try to raise £500 million over the next five years, and I want to say a bit about how vital this is by giving a few examples of the support that the charity gives the hospital.

We are now working to complete what will be called the Premier Inn Clinical Building. It will fit seamlessly with the Morgan Stanley Clinical Building, which was opened in June 2012, to complete what we call our Mittal Children’s Medical Centre. It is truly state of the art. It houses a new surgery centre, a high-specification respiratory ward and a high-dependency area, where the most unwell children can be carefully helped back to better health. The cost to deliver this is scheduled to be around £300 million, and the charity is still working to raise the final amount to make that happen.

Research is absolutely fundamental to everything that a hospital like Great Ormond Street does. If we have to be innovative, we have to be not just the hospital that does research but a research hospital. I shall give one example, which had some publicity last year, of a world first. One year-old Layla was cured of her leukaemia thanks to a gene editing technique developed and used by Professor Waseem Qasim. He designed a new treatment that uses what are called molecular scissors to edit genes and create designer immune cells programmed to hunt out and kill drug-resistant leukaemia. Research like this is made possible only thanks to charity-funded specialist laboratories dedicated to gene therapy research. Our new centre for research into rare diseases, which will be completed in 2018, will take forward a lot of that really innovative, life-changing research. Again, the money for that is being raised through the charity.

The charity also helps the hospital by securing extremely expensive equipment, such as a 3T magnetic resonance imaging machine and scanners that allow us to take much clearer and more detailed pictures of children’s bodies than was ever possible before. That allows faster and more accurate diagnosis, followed by better treatments for the children.

Treating children at home is something that we are also trying to develop at the hospital. Every parent with a very sick child longs for that child to go home, and every very sick child longs to go home. If we can release them from hospital and get them home faster, that makes a huge difference to them. One example of this is that we are now able to allow home dialysis to take place—again, thanks to charity funding. We have been the first hospital in Europe to offer home dialysis for children with serious kidney conditions. Before that, children had to come into the hospital a minimum of three times a week, spending four hours having dialysis. Home dialysis allows them hugely greater freedom and has dramatically improved their quality of life. Those are just a few examples.

I want to finish by asking a question of the Minister. I wonder whether he can clarify the details of the commencement of the provisions of the Bill. As I understand it, a number of NHS charities are still in the process of converting to independent charities. How long will it take for these conversions to be completed, and is it or is it not correct that they have to be completed before Clauses 1 and 2 and Schedule 1 can come into force? I would be really grateful if he could clarify that.

I end by thanking the many supporters of the charity—some of whom, indeed, are probably in this House—from the corporate sponsors to the big celebrity donors, but, above all, the many, many members of the public who support us by giving regular donations over many years.

Last of all, in his absence, I should thank JM Barrie for his extraordinary legacy when he donated the copyright to the hospital in 1929. “Peter Pan” has raised large sums of money, which has been put to wonderful use. It is now important that this legacy is safeguarded by passing this Peter Pan and Wendy Bill.